You don't know me yet. And I know that everything on this page is designed to change that — which makes honesty the only strategy worth using. So here it is, plainly: I'm writing you a letter instead of building a portfolio because portfolios are performances. Letters are promises.

This one is mine to you. I'll tell you who I am, what I've built, what I've failed at, and what I'm building now. By the end, you'll either want to work with me or you won't. Either way, you'll know exactly what you're getting.

I live in Newberg, Oregon with my wife Ashley and our son Legend. If that sounds like a small-town life, it is — and it's the right one. Ashley runs a nanny service called Just Little Steps. I spend my mornings with kids I care for and my nights building software. That's not a metaphor. Those are my actual days.

I create investigative content about the Pacific Northwest under a brand called Adventures of Shanghai — exploring abandoned places, hidden stories, and the parts of Oregon most people drive past. I've got about 4,000 followers on TikTok and a filing cabinet of stories I haven't told yet.

But the reason you're reading this probably isn't the content work. It's because I build things.

There are five qualities that show up in everything I do: integrity, clear communication, empathy, adaptability, and empowering others. I didn't learn these from a leadership book. I didn't study them in school. They're just the defaults I've always operated from — the settings that were already there when I showed up.

Years into my career, I came across something called the Oz Principle: See It, Own It, Solve It, Do It. And I laughed, because I'd been running that exact playbook my entire life without knowing it had a name. When something is broken, I see it. When it's mine to fix, I own it. When the solution isn't obvious, I find one. And then I do the work.

That pattern has defined every chapter of my story.

It started at a moving company that was doing things wrong.

I don't mean wrong in the abstract, boardroom sense. I mean wrong in the way that customers noticed: broken furniture, missed windows, crews that didn't care. I was on one of those crews, and I couldn't leave it alone. I kept seeing the gaps — in the scheduling, in the training, in how we talked to people — and I kept filling them. Not because anyone asked. Because they were there.

At some point, I stopped filling other people's gaps and started building my own thing.

I built Confidence Home Services from a single truck and a phone into an operation that hit $432,000 in annual revenue with 25 employees. Over eight years, I built everything from scratch: the logistics systems, the sales process, marketing campaigns across print, door-to-door, affiliate channels, and a full online presence with social channels and a real review base.

I developed teams. I trained people who had never held a professional job and watched them become reliable, confident workers. I delivered on every promise with the kind of service where customers called back not because they had a problem, but because they wanted to say thank you.

The hardest part wasn't the logistics or the revenue. It was learning that empowering others means letting them fail, being there when they do, and never holding it against them. That's where empathy becomes a business tool — not a soft skill, but the infrastructure that holds a team together.

I eventually sold the business. That decision was its own kind of growth.

Then I discovered AI. And something clicked that hadn't clicked before.

I'd always been a builder, but I'd never been a developer. I didn't have a CS degree. I didn't know Python. I'd never touched a terminal in my life. But when I started working with large language models, I recognized something familiar: systems that were broken, gaps that needed filling, and the itch to fix them myself.

So I went all in. Not cautiously. Not “on the side.” I went the way I always go — completely.

In six months — self-taught, AI-augmented, learning every single day — I've built production systems that actually run:

Helix Cortex is an AI memory and intelligence platform. It handles conversation memory, knowledge base indexing, file versioning, code analysis, and knowledge graph construction. It's the backbone of everything else I build. It runs in production on my own infrastructure.

MemBrain is a Chrome extension that intercepts browser requests and injects contextual memory into AI conversations. It extracts facts, stores them locally, and auto-injects relevant context on every message. It's how I give AI the memory it doesn't have natively.

The Provisioner manages 45+ MCP servers with dynamic lifecycle management — spinning containers up and down on demand instead of running everything always-on. It reduced my active container count by more than half while keeping every service available.

I also run MW Development, an AI automation agency targeting service businesses in the $500K–$5M range. And Confidence Lighting, a seasonal Christmas lights installation business that uses the operational playbook I built at Confidence Home Services.

Am I a senior developer? No. I'm approaching junior developer capability in the areas that matter — infrastructure, APIs, system architecture, automation. But here's what I bring that most junior developers don't: I've managed 25 people. I've closed hundreds of thousands in revenue. I've built systems under real-world pressure where the customer is standing in their living room watching you work.

I know how to ship. I know how to lead. And I'm learning the technical craft faster than most people think is possible.

I believe that the best work comes from people who care about the outcome more than the credit. I believe clear communication isn't a soft skill — it's the hardest skill, and the one most people avoid. I believe adaptability isn't about being flexible with your values; it's about being flexible with your methods while your values stay fixed.

I believe that trust is built by doing what you said you would do, and that the fastest way to earn someone's confidence is to be honest when you don't know something.

I don't know everything. I know that clearly. But I know how to build, and I know how to learn, and those two things together have never let me down.

If you're looking for someone who will show up, figure it out, and deliver — I'm that person. If you need someone who can bridge the gap between business operations and technical systems, who understands both the customer standing in the doorway and the API endpoint behind the screen — that's me.

If you're building something and you want a partner who will care about it like it's theirs — because that's the only way I know how to work — then let's talk.

I'm not the most experienced developer in the room. But I might be the most determined. And I will never, ever stop learning.